Kisha Club - Disadvantages of Kisha Clubs

Disadvantages of Kisha Clubs

This type of organization only exists in Japan. Allowing specific newspaper companies or broadcasting stations to have a monopoly on reporting makes it easy to manipulate information. Smaller media companies, freelance journalists and foreign news organizations are often blocked from joining kisha clubs, and kisha clubs increase the chances of an improper relationship with the subjects of the reporting. For these reasons, kisha clubs have been criticized both in Japan and overseas as a symbol of the lack of openness to external groups and feudalistic nature of Japanese systems.

There are also cases of regulations imposed by kisha clubs on reporting at off the record occasions such as informal conventions. If these regulations are broken, the offender is often subject to penalties, such as being forbidden from attending the kisha club.

There is criticism that press rooms set up for kisha clubs by government agencies, local public bodies and the police are paid for with taxes, but can only be used by the member companies, leading to corruption. If local government agencies are included, the total yearly costs are thought to run to 600 million yen.

In 1921, a gas company bribed the Tokyo City Council (東京市議会, Tokyo-shi gikai?) to gain approval for a rise in gas prices. It was discovered that newspaper reporters attending the city hall and Tokyo Metropolitan Police kisha clubs had also been bribed, an event condemned by public opinion. (The Tokyo Gas suspected bribery incident.)

In 1974, when the weekly magazine Bungei Shunshū reported on the Kakuei Tanaka funding problem, the allegations were already well known in the kisha club but the media was silent about the story.

In 1998, during the broadcast on TBS of the TV program Sōri to Kataru (総理と語る?), "A Conversation with the Prime Minister", News 23 anchor Tetsuya Chikushi suggested to the Prime Minister of the time, Keizō Obuchi that, given the success of the Town Meetings held by President Bill Clinton, also shown by TBS, perhaps Obuchi would also like to take part in Clinton-style Town Meetings. Obuchi was keen, but the plan was scuppered due to opposition from the kisha club, and in the end Sori to Kataru continued to be shown in the same format as before. (Chikushi related these events in his book, Newscaster. Incidentally, Chikushi is known for having a critical stance towards kisha clubs.)

In 1999, there was an incident where some members of the media had a row with staff at the Ministry of Agriculture, Farming and Fisheries over the display of a Japanese flag at the meeting hall of the ministry kisha club. This was just after the National Flag and National Anthem Law (国旗国歌法, Kokki Kokka Hō?) was passed, in the midst of a debate about whether the government was forcing groups to display flags. In response to actions by some sections of the media, there was criticism from both those in favor of the National Flag and National Anthem Law and those against, including comments such as "They shouldn't be making a scene inside Ministry buildings in the first place" and "Isn't this just a sign of the egotism of kisha clubs?"

In 2000, the then Prime Minister Keizō Obuchi suddenly made telephone calls to Nippon TV and TV Asahi, and was allowed to appear live on these channels. The related kisha clubs criticized TV Asahi, saying that this was "unprecedented". (Nippon TV was not criticized.)

On June 25, 2000, some notes titled "A personal view on tomorrow's press conference" were found lying on the ground at the Cabinet Kisha Club (内閣記者会, Naikaku Kisha Kai?), a kisha club in the grounds of the Japanese Prime Minister's official residence. This was the day before the meeting at which Prime Minister Yoshirō Mori was due to make an explanation about his "Kami no kuni" statements about religion in Japan, and the notes appeared to be a set of directions to the Prime Minister on how to handle questions from the media. Even though weekly news magazines published the name of the media organization (NHK) responsible for writing the document, the Cabinet Kisha Club did not take an active efforts to investigate the cause of the incident. The format in which the document was printed was the same as that of "communication e-mails" from the 5300 system terminals used for printing NHK stories, and the document also contained a term meaning "private broadcasters", minpō (民放?), which was only likely to have been used by NHK.

There has been criticism that the main work of reporters in a press room tends to be to summarize the contents of press conferences, so that they neglect to check whether what is announced is true and are more easily subject to media manipulation, and that this leads to fewer reporters learning to go out to different locations to do research. Akira Uozumi, a former Kyōdō News journalist, stated that kisha clubs slowly wear down reporters psychologically, and blunt their instincts as journalists, saying (in the Asahi Shimbun, on May 26, 2001), that "if 70% or 80% of your job is collecting secondary or tertiary information from government agencies as quickly as possible, it dulls your instinct for sensing what is actually going on in the world. Before you know it, the logic of the civil servants works its way into you, and it gets more difficult to think from the point of view of the people being governed. I thought it wasn't happening to me, but five years after becoming freelance, I gradually began to realize it was." As a result of this, most media reports are reports of announcements to kisha clubs, a phenomenon unthinkable in a developed country. In addition, there is criticism that the kisha club system decreases the distance between reporters and politicians, leading to improper relationships. As proof of this, Tarō Kawano, a member of the House of Representatives, has said that it is normal for reporters (from the Japanese media) to have meals paid for by politicians (which would never happen in any other developed country), that when politicians go on visits reporters stay in the same hotel, and that the media consider that the sign of a "good reporter" is when "the reporter and the politicians are the best of friends". (Quoted in "How the media hide facts, and how the media is being tricked" (隠すマスコミ、騙されるマスコミ, Kakusu masukomi, damasareru masukomi?) by Masakazu Kobayashi (小林雅一?), published by Bunshun Shinsho (文春新書?). In addition, during the Matsumoto sarin incident, reports based on information given by the Metropolitan Police to a kisha club treated the first witness as a criminal.

There is also the criticism that kisha club are exclusive by nature, and rarely allow representatives of the new media, the foreign media or freelance journalists to join. In response to this, the Japan Newspaper Publishers and Editors Association introduced a policy whereby members from the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan would be treated in the same way as members from the Japan Newspaper Publishers and Editors Association, and in the late 1990s admitted Reuters as a member of the Kabuto Club. Since then, foreign-owned media organizations such as Bloomberg and Dow Jones with large-scale information-gathering networks have joined the majority of kisha clubs, and are involved in their administration. However, this has only been possible for a handful of foreign-owned media organizations, and as most foreign media organizations with representatives in Tokyo have only a few reporters there, it is impossible for them to have reporters join and remain present at kisha clubs. In fact, the EU has criticised kisha clubs for being exclusive, and the opinion has been stated that the kisha club system should be abolished, and all journalists with a reporter's pass issued by the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs allowed to collect material for stories at public institutions. This exclusivity is the reason why foreign journalists were not allowed to attend the police conference on the disappearance and murder of the British woman Lucie Blackman, and that when Prime Minister Koizumi visited the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, non-members of the kisha club were not allowed to accompany him. (Statement by Private Secretary Isao Iijima.) Reporters Without Borders, a journalists' organization which campaigns to protect the rights of journalists to freedom of speech, is calling for the Japanese government to abolish the kisha club system.